Obituary - Zoe Polanska-Palmer, Scots-based writer and campaigner who survived brutal Nazi experiments

Died: February 16, 2017

ZOE Polanska-Palmer, who has died aged 89, was a survivor of the appalling sterilisation experiments carried out by Nazi doctors in Auschwitz and witnessed some of the most harrowing moments of the Second World War. She recounted those horrors in an understated way in her book Yalta Victim which was published to acclaim in 1986.

The book was written after an amazing coincidence. Ms Polanska-Palmer, who had settled in Scotland and was a long-time resident of Dundee, had never spoken to anyone of her time at Auschwitz until one day in the 1970s when an elderly man stopped her in the street in Broughty Ferry. He thought he recognised her and asked if she would lift up her hair which hid a prominent mole on her forehead. A mystified Zoe obliged and was stunned when he asked her, “Were you in Auschwitz?”.

The man, a commando sergeant called Bremner was one of around 800 British prisoners held at the vast death complex. In a freezing cold punishment bunker, he was considering how he could end his sufferings when he looked out onto a square where young girls were standing holding rocks over their heads and enduring beatings when they dropped them. One of them was a beautiful young Russian girl with a mole on her forehead. Bremner said that Zoe’s example of endurance had steadied his nerves.

The coincidence was so great that the old soldier insisted they visit a lawyer in Dundee and swear a statement. He also encouraged her to write a book about her astonishing survival.

Zoe Polanska-Palmer was born in the Odessa region of what was then the Soviet Union; her father’s family had been landowners and suffered under Stalin’s repression. Their lands were seized during the forced collectivization of farms. Zoe’s father was imprisoned briefly but his two brothers disappeared into the infamous Gulag prison camp system.

Nonetheless, she enjoyed a loving family upbringing in the Ukrainian countryside, a happy existence that was shattered in June 1941. Her home was directly in the path of the invading Nazis and the first horror came when the family’s sunflower field was turned into an unimaginable scene of carnage with dozens of red army bodies crushed by tanks.

It was not long before Zoe and her terrified mother, hiding in a cornfield, witnessed the massacre of dozens of Jewish women and children by German soldiers of the Einsatzgruppen death squads. Zoe, who vomited at the scene of the shootings, recalled “they fell, those poor wretches, like autumn leaves into the deep, long trenches.”

Zoe was horrified by the shocking treatment of starving Soviet prisoners and was lucky to survive when the Germans opened fire on her and her mother as they tried to bring the food to the dying Red Army men.

In 1943, the Germans began kidnapping young children for forced labour. When they came to Zoe’s home, they shot her protesting father in front of her and packed her into a cattle truck bound for Auschwitz. (Only much later when she was reunited with her mother during a trade visit to the USSR did she learn that her father had survived the shooting.)

In Auschwitz, Zoe was selected for experimentation aimed at developing systems for the sterilisation of the Slavic peoples. Her ovaries were electrocuted and she was force-fed and injected with various concoctions.

She never recovered and was unable to have children. She also witnessed the notorious Dr Mengele experimenting on twins and she recounted how the young girls around her looked ancient: “faces shrivelled up like old prunes, hair like straw. Their bushy eyebrows indicated a long stay and some of them had huge pregnant bellies.”

Zoe Polanska-Palmer’s life was saved by a Russian doctor and after her transfer to Dachau concentration camp she was able to escape from farm labour during an air-raid, surviving in the confusion of central Europe at the end of the war.

As a displaced Russian person in Austria, she was witness to one last tragedy – the forced repatriation to the Soviet Union, as part of the Yalta agreement, of Cossacks and White Russians who had fought with Hitler. Knowing their fate, she watched as entire families committed suicide by jumping into the River Drau and as Cossacks shot their families then themselves. Luckily a British doctor took pity on an injured Zoe and pulled her off the train which would have taken her to years in the Gulag – at best.

As she waited in a camp for permission to settle in Britain, Zoe met a young Canadian serviceman. She married Arthur Palmer and they lived happily together in Broughty Ferry until his death in 2014.

For decades Zoe Polanska-Palmer carried on a campaign for compensation from the German government with a filing cabinet full of correspondence. The Germans compensated Jewish victims but did not recognise Russian victims – much to Ms Polanska-Palmer's ire.

When the Hollywood director Fred Zinneman visited Dundee and asked if he could make a film of the book but casting Zoe as Jewish rather than Russian, she declined: “I am Russian, not Jewish and we also suffered.”

In 2004 after a BBC radio documentary, the Germans relented and Ms Polanska-Palmer received the princely sum of £2,000 in compensation.

My lasting memory of this elegant lady, who loved life so much, is of her sipping a chilled sherry, surrounded by her paintings telling me with a glint of steel in her eye: “I will never forget and I will never forgive.”

GRAHAM OGILVY